Although NASA is assuring us that there is no change of impacting Earth, it will be the closest fly by of an asteroid this size ever recorded. Closer than many satellites orbiting our planet. 5,000 miles closer.

Although NASA is assuring us that there is no change of impacting Earth, it will be the closest fly by of an asteroid this size ever recorded. Closer than many satellites orbiting our planet. 5,000 miles closer.
150-foot asteroid to zoom near Earth this week.

"It will be 5,000 miles closer than the ring of weather, communications and GPS navigation satellites that orbit the Earth..."

I thought the GPS sats were in low orbit.DavidSitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

I was going to ask if this close encounter would change the orbit. But reading the article, They have to see how that thing is rotating to get an idea if it will change. Im sure they will radar the heck out of that asteroid. [/quote]

Although NASA is assuring us that there is no change of impacting Earth, it will be the closest fly by of an asteroid this size ever recorded. Closer than many satellites orbiting our planet. 5,000 miles closer.
150-foot asteroid to zoom near Earth this week.

"It will be 5,000 miles closer than the ring of weather, communications and GPS navigation satellites that orbit the Earth..."

Now, 'meteor explosions' over the planet do not just happen every day either.
And you are trying to tell me, as a somewhat educated man, that the two events just kinda happened around the same kinda time and are not kinda related????????

I call bullshit. I suspect it was either a fragment that broke off of the asteroid or some space junk that was being towed behind it that was drawn in by the earth's gravity.

Actually, the asteroid pass is this afternoon (Central time, which you are), not yesterday.DavidSitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

The event in Russia is more common than you think, much more common than the big asteroid passing. We hear little or nothing about most meteor explosions in the atmosphere because most of them occur where there is no property or no humans. There is a group of astronomers here in Canada using a network of microphones to triangulate high altitude explosions like this, and they regularly locate explosions that nobody else reports.

There will be more of these kinds of events reported as time passes as there are fewer unpopulated areas. We see the same thing happening with weather events in rural Canada. Where I grew up in central Alberta gets a few tornadoes every spring. For years nobody cared, because all they did was flatten the odd wheat field or tear up a bit of fence. In the last 20 years these have been more likely to hit towns and villages, just because there are now more towns and villages spread across the prairies.

And finally, here's one for the conspiracy theories. A Russian web site claims their government tried to shoot down whatever it was, and that caused most of the damage.

Zapped - wrong space lump, that was far too early for the Friday afternoon's one (actually more like mid evening given its expected to fly-by over Eastern Europe)Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?